Otherworldly, worldly and underworldly music

I finally managed to hear the 2007 release of the entire Jerry Goldsmith score to Alien. The film's 30th anniversary was last year, but the score seems totally timeless. It's a bold, brave piece, especially for film music, filled with majestic and ethereal sequences and these absolutely furious, outright grotesque sound sculptures. It's Goldsmith's genius that the score somehow combines these two dimensions and comes across as an integrated piece instead of haphazard moments. Stunning.

The strength of the original comes clearly into focus when you consider James Horner's score for Aliens. Horner uses Goldsmith's signature Alien motifs tastefully, but the original parts in the score pale hopelessly in comparison. Action has never been Horner's forte, anyway, and his best action movie scores musically emphasize mood rather than aggression. His Apocalypto score, for example, is actually a pretty wonderful combination of ethnic instruments, vocals and synthesized soundscapes. Too bad the film the music appears in is utterly repugnant.

Elliott Goldenthal faded Goldsmith out almost completely on his Alien 3 score, and with great success. His creation is almost atonal and destructive, a formidable orchestral version of very black metal, and one of my lasting favorites.

Back on planet Earth, I dug up Yes frontman Jon Anderson's first solo album Olias of Sunhillow, a record I return to every now and then. Initially (in 1975) it was considered difficult or impenetrable, but in 2010 it sounds like a slightly more complex than usual world music album, nothing too challenging there. It's pretty spheric stuff, though, and some of the synth sounds are very reminiscent of Vangelis' sonic arsenal, as if anticipating the Jon & Vangelis collaboration that took place three years later.

Sounds from the underworld to close this posting... One of my metal favorites, Norway's wonderfully inventive Dimmu Borgir, recently released their new album called Abrahadabra, and... I'm slightly at a loss here. With their previous album, In Sorte Diaboli, they reached a maturation point in combining the sound of a full symphony orchestra to the blast of the band. The result was simply great, powerful, merciless but also very stylish and nuanced. This time around, though, the orchestra dominates the proceedings so much that I cannot but wonder what's this going to sound like live. They must either drop the orchestral stuff (which may leave the band arrangements sounding bare) or they play the orchestra tracks from a hard disk (which may look kind of silly since there's really a lot of sound). The album's material is OK but I feel it's a bit less brilliant than on the last couple of records, and the band is really overshadowed by the classical dudes (who play fiercely here) in lots of places. I love both classical and metal, but in this case the result is an uneasy tightrope act, a case of "to be or not to be". Hope they can get the material work live, because they are an excellent band and I hope they will keep experimenting.